overcome, was softened by the latter’s enthusiasm for those radical, heretical dimensions of Judaism which might have resonated, to some extent, with the drives behind the project of critical theory. Both eagerly conveyed their impressions of that meeting, and of each other, to Benjamin. Their accounts shed much light on the origins and foundations of the long-lasting and wide-ranging dialogue that ensued. On May 6, just a few weeks after his arrival in New York, Scholem wrote to Benjamin that he:
was able to establish a very sympathetic relationship [with Wiesengrund-Adorno]. I like him immensely, and we found quite a lot to say to one another. I intend to cultivate relations with him and his wife quite vigorously. Talking with him is pleasant and engaging, and I find it possible to reach agreement on many things. You shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that we spend a great deal of time mulling over your situation.12
Benjamin responded from Paris two months later: “I was pleased to see that some things go smoothly as soon as my back is turned. How many complaints have I heard de part et d’autre about you and Wiesengrund! And now it all turns out to have been much ado about nothing. Nobody is more pleased about that than I am.”13
Decades later, Scholem explained his sudden change of heart at these meetings, further elucidating his perspective on the beginning of his friendship with Adorno:
The good spirit that prevailed in the meetings between Adorno and me was due not so much to the cordiality of the reception as to my considerable surprise at Adorno’s appreciation of the continuing theological element in Benjamin. I had expected a Marxist who would insist on the liquidation of what were in my opinion the most valuable furnishings in Benjamin’s intellectual household. Instead I encountered here a man who definitely had an open mind and even a positive attitude toward these traits, although he viewed them from his own dialectical perspective.14
Adorno reported to Benjamin on this remarkable meeting in a letter from March 1938:
You may find this hard to believe, but the first time we got to meet him [Scholem] was at the Tillichs…. Not exactly the best atmosphere in which to be introduced to the Sohar; and especially since Frau Tillich’s relationship to the Kabbala seems to resemble that of a terrified teenager [Backfisch: also, literally, fried fish] to pornography. The antinomian Maggid was extremely reserved towards me at first, and clearly regarded me as some sort of dangerous arch-seducer…. Needless to say, nothing of the kind was actually said, and Scholem contrived to sustain the fiction, with considerable brash grace, that he knew nothing at all about me except that a book of mine had been published by the blessed Siebeck [publisher of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard]. Nevertheless, I somehow succeeded in breaking the spell and he began to show some kind of trust in me, something which I think will continue to grow.
We have spent a couple of evenings together, as the ringing in your ears has presumably already told you by now; once on our own, in a discussion which touched in part upon our own last conversation in San Remo concerning theology, and in part upon my Husserl piece, which Scholem read with great care, as if it were some intelligence test. We spent the second evening in the company of Max, and Scholem, who was in great form, regaled us in detail with the most astonishing things in connection with Sabbatian and Frankist mysticism; a number of which, however, sounded so clearly reminiscent of some of Rosenberg’s notions about “the people,” that Max was seriously concerned about the prospect of more of this kind actually appearing in print. It is not altogether easy for me to convey my own impression of Scholem. This is indeed a classic case of the conflict between duty and inclination. My personal inclination comes into play most strongly when he makes himself the advocate [Anwalt] of the theological moment of your, and perhaps I might also say of my own, philosophy.15
It is remarkable, though perhaps not surprising, that in this letter Adorno critically and presciently diagnoses exactly what Scholem would write years after his death, namely of the theological element not only in Benjamin’s but also in his – Adorno’s – own thought. Already during their first conversations, Adorno and Scholem discovered that they shared much more with each other than they had initially themselves presumed. Scholem displayed what seems to be a genuine and profound interest in Adorno’s work. Although he dismissed the main thesis of Adorno’s Kierkegaard book and accused its author of plagiarism, Scholem was indeed intrigued by the materialist, dialectical reading of a theological thinker. Adorno’s work on Husserl, which began as his dissertation and continued – with various versions of papers published along the way – until the publication in 1956 of his book on Husserl, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie [trans. as Against Epistemology: A Metacritique], seems to have sparked Scholem’s own philosophical interest. Scholem’s initially critical and often dismissive approach toward Adorno’s work (in letters to Benjamin and others) was increasingly overturned, and he ultimately came to discover a common language with the dialectical social philosopher. His interest in Adorno’s work, although motivated at first by Benjamin and the proximity to his work, largely transcends their shared interest in all things Benjamin. Adorno and Scholem’s correspondence reveals, for the first time, the full scope of the thematic resonance that they found with each other.
Adorno, for his part, was – cautiously – fascinated by Scholem’s work on religious mysticism and its heretical, transgressive offshoots. Baptized as a Catholic and raised in an assimilated Jewish family, which kept its distance from anything “professionally Jewish,” Adorno was never a religious thinker, and even less so a Jewish thinker – at least not conspicuously. His interest in Kierkegaard’s theological thought was philosophical and predominantly aesthetic. Furthermore, as a harsh critic of irrationality and the occult, Adorno had an attitude toward Kabbalah and the mystical dimensions of life that could not, at first glance, have been more apprehensive. But in Scholem’s writings he did not perceive an irrational relapse into mythical thinking of the sort he critically diagnoses, for example, in Minima Moralia, as occultism. “The tendency to occultism,” he notes there, “is a symptom of regression in consciousness. This has lost the power to think the unconditional and to endure the conditional.”16 On the contrary, Scholem’s work on mysticism represented for Adorno an alternative to the all-consuming power of instrumental reason, a realm of possibilities beyond the given social order and the limitations that this social order imposed on thought and the imagination. As Adorno understood Scholem’s project, mysticism does not necessarily seek to transcend the given reality in order to escape to an imaginary realm outside of it. Rather than fleeing the conditional into a regressive and escapist form of metaphysical surrogate for this world, it translated concrete, material, earthly life into mystical categories, thereby allowing for a critical perspective on this life.
At the time of their first encounter in 1938, Scholem had already published a significant body of work on various aspects of Jewish mysticism. His Munich dissertation, a German translation of the Bahir, the first book of the Kabbalah, was published in 1922. His annotated German translation of a chapter from the Zohar, the most central book of the Kabbalah, furnished with his detailed introduction on the book’s historical and conceptual aspects, was published in 1935. In his lectures at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, held at the time of his first conversations with Adorno, Scholem elaborated on this topic, which was the subject, in part, of their discussion. But at that time Scholem was enthusiastically pursuing pioneering research into another dimension of Jewish mysticism, namely heretical messianism. In 1937, he published a text that would become a signpost of modern scholarship on Sabbatianism and Frankism, the Jewish heretical movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that followed the self-proclaimed messiahs Sabbatai Sevi (1626–1676) and Jacob Frank (1726–1791), respectively. “Mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba’averah” – literally: a commandment fulfilled by transgression – initially published only in Hebrew, was translated into English only decades later, in 1971, as “Redemption through Sin.”17 Aware of the subject’s delicate, controversial dimensions and its inflammatory potential, Scholem insisted on keeping a discussion of its topic within the boundaries of Jewish communities. He published an abbreviated, expurgated German version of the text, excluding all the transgressive and contentious elements.18
